Bump in the Night
by Smileyfax
Summary: Some monsters are all too real...as Daria Morgendorffer can attest to.
1. Chapter 1

"Authorities found another mangled body in the small town of Highland, Texas earlier today, bringing the death count of the Highland Slasher up to nine..." The picture on the TV screen died.

Daria narrowed her eyes ever so slightly at Helen, who held the offending remote controller in one hand as she looked disapprovingly at Daria. "Honestly, sweetie, how many times have I told you not to watch such morbid television?"

"But you and dad watch the evening news all the time," Daria countered back. That was the program she had been watching, after all.

"No buts, young lady. You were scaring your sister with that show, and you know it." Indeed, Quinn (who had been combing her Barbie's hair on the floor in front of the television) had run off screaming when the newscaster uttered the word 'mangled'. It had amused Daria ever so briefly.

Helen turned around to the doorway, around which Quinn was peeking. "It's okay, Quinn, I turned off the TV. Everything is alright."

Quinn sniffled a bit. "It...it is?"

"That's right, Quinn."

"So there really isn't a monster in town?"

Helen looked a little conflicted at this, as Daria watched on with interest. "Well, sweetie...it's not a monster that's out there doing those horrible things. It's a human. And I want you to promise that you won't go out at night, or go out alone, or talk to any strangers, okay? I just want you to be safe."

"I promise, mommy," Quinn swore gravely. The mother and daughter hugged.

Daria felt sick.

XXXX

A few days later, on a Friday night, Daria was reading books at the library when she looked out a window and realized the sun was setting. While Helen hadn't forbade her from being out and about at night (which had stung Daria just a little, though she'd never admit it), she was sure to get a stern talking-to regardless when she got home.

Home was several miles away, and by the time Daria had checked out a few choice titles, the sun was almost completely down. The moon was full, so the streetlights which were frequently in disrepair wouldn't be necessary.

Daria shivered a few times as the night-time breeze brushed her exposed skin, sending goosebumps up and down it. Autumn was in the air, and she had another school year of being surrounded by morons to look forward to.

An older van, brown, with a few dents and scratches, pulled up on the roadside next to her. "Hey, little girl, you lost?" asked the man inside. He was overweight, balding, wore thick glasses, and looked completely unthreatening, yet everything about him screamed 'predator'. "You want me to give you a lift somewhere?" he asked helpfully.

"I don't take rides from strangers," Daria replied dutifully, having had the answer drilled into her from her youngest years.

"Come on, don't be that way. My name's Jeb. What's yours?"

Daria rolled her eyes at the attempt, but humored him. "Daria."

"That's a pretty name," he creepily complimented. "Now that we've been introduced, we're not strangers any more. So how about a ride?"

Daria stared him in the eyes for a few moments. "Okay," she finally relented.

Jeb's face lit up. "You will? Great!" Instead of opening the passenger door, he got out of the driver's seat and opened the sliding door on the van's side. Daria noticed some soiled sheets and what appeared to be restraints inside the van's rear.

She pulled herself up into it regardless.

Jeb, smiling eagerly and practically licking his lips, closed the van's side door.

After a few moments, the van began rocking violently side to side, as screams filled the night air. After a few more moments, they abruptly stopped.

Three minutes passed between the time the van's door closed and the time it opened again. Daria hopped out, one hand still holding the backpack where her library books were.

She was licking the blood off her other hand.

After she finished that task, she turned around and evaluated the van. With a sigh, she realized she would have to bury the van and dump the body somewhere. (Two different somewheres, of course. She shut the van's door so that what little remained of Jeb wouldn't fall out, shouldered the backpack to free up both her hands, and then lifted the van above her head with both hands, and began to walk again.

She ended up being much later than she had anticipated, and her parents, in a combination of anger, panic, and fear, forbade her from going to the library ever again without supervision.

The next morning, Jeb's body was found, and the Highland Slasher's kill count grew to ten victims. 


	2. Chapter 2

Daria didn't like Lawndale. Much.

She supposed it was better than Highland...it wasn't an utter hellhole, for one. The climate was nicer. The people were nicer.

That last bit grated on Daria more than it gratified her, though. Nice people made her teeth itch.

At least she had her refuge at home, with mom and dad. They were possibly the least cheery people alive, all because of the reason they had moved to Lawndale.

It's not like Quinn was any great loss, Daria thought.

They had been having one of their usual sibling spats when Daria had simply lost patience and thrust her hand into Quinn's belly, messily removing her guts. The scream of agony was music to Daria's ears as she feasted on her sister's intestines. Growing tired of them after a minute (and a little worried that the neighbors would hear), she casually twisted Quinn's head 360 degrees around her neck, rendering her quite dead.

She had finished devouring one leg (bone, cartilage, ligaments and all) and had gotten to work on the second when she heard the garage door open, heralding the return of her parents. (They had gone out to dinner for the night). She opened the window, Quinn's body slung over one shoulder, and dashed for the tree line at the far end of the back yard, making it just as her mother's first screams reached her ears. (She must have reached Quinn's room and found the blood that had splattered everywhere as Daria had eaten).

She dumped her sister's carcass and contemplated her next move. By now, her parents would have noticed her missing as well, and would have called every federal, state, and local law enforcement agency down to find their two girls, so sneaking back in was out. There wasn't a nearby river or lake she could have washed the blood off in, then later claim to have gone for a walk. She considered the best course of action to be returning home as-is, acting shell-shocked and pretending to be unable to recall exactly what had happened.

Helen cried out as she saw her eldest daughter shamble towards the house, her clothing torn, one lens cracked in her glasses, and oh yes, spattered with gore. (Daria had damaged her clothing, to make the ruse more convincing). No matter what platitudes her husband and the police officers offered her, she knew at that instant that Quinn had been killed in a most horrible manner, something which only became real for the others when a deputy stumbled across Quinn's body (and barely managed to turn away in time before vomiting) the next day.

Helen found refuge by throwing herself into her work, and soon applied to and received a job as associate attorney at a prestigious firm in Lawndale. Jake found refuge in the closest bottle of alcohol he could find. Helen argued with him about it, but Daria knew it was half-hearted at best, and if she weren't the sole breadwinner now, she would likely have joined him in committing suicide by gradual liver failure.

The only person at Lawndale Middle School Daria felt more than tolerance for was Jane Lane. She wasn't off-put by whatever intrinsic attribute threw other people off; in fact, she soon warmed up to Daria's abrasive, snarky attitude. Despite all that, the warmest feelings Daria felt for Jane were when she imagined sucking the marrow from her spinal vertebrae. Still, Jane was a like mind, even if she didn't share in Daria's appetite, and that counted for something. (Daria occasionally entertained the idea of giving Jane a taste of her life, but even though they occasionally joked about killing their classmates, Jane was still disgustingly humane, and would be utterly repulsed, and would probably tell somebody).

Daria's first kill in Lawndale was a jogger she picked at random. She simply waited until one foggy morning, went out for a long walk, and tore the arms off the first person she spotted. In retrospect, this was not the best of plans, and demonstrated to her that Lawndale was incredibly different from Highland in more ways than she had initially imagined.

The neighborhood Daria had killed the jogger in was Crewe Neck, the 'rich' part of Lawndale. The jogger she had killed was one Andrew Landon, prominent businessman, inventor, pillar of the community, and father of two. His wife, a senior Vice President at a prominent finance company, posted a hundred thousand dollar reward for the capture of the killer. (She had even used the words 'Dead or Alive', like the poster for an outlaw in the old west would have). Worse yet, the police were actually competent. Daria never left behind any evidence, but it was still troubling how quickly they had scoured the scene for evidence, asked around for potential eyewitnesses, and so forth. She was just so used to the bungling of the Highland PD she hadn't given any thought to how to deal with an actually threatening police force. (Sometimes, back in Highland, she even imagined that they didn't look too hard for the Highland Slasher, as it drew in tourist money from the incredibly morbid).

Daria regretted having to do so, but she resolved to cut her nocturnal activities way down...as little as one 'hunt' every few months, and only trawled from society's dregs. It bothered her having to limit herself like that, but under the circumstances, she saw no other course which did not end up with her imprisoned or dead.

This worked fine until her parents had the idea to send her to summer camp once school had gone out for the year. They did it to help make Daria more sociable, they told her, and to help her cope with the loss of her sister. It was a hell of a way to go about it; back at Highland, she had acted stony and distant after Quinn's death, but then, she always acted that way. Helen and Jake had sent her to therapy for a few weeks after Quinn's death, where she spoon-fed the man all the answers he wanted to hear, and received a clean bill of health just before the move to Lawndale. She had still acted stony and distant, though, which bothered her parents more than they had let on. Hence: summer camp.

At least she had made one friend at camp, a girl named Amelia. She wasn't like Jane - she was much more eager to please, almost desperate to keep Daria as a friend, and was more of a hanger-on than anything else. One afternoon, out of boredom, she confessed to Amelia that she was sexually attracted to Adolf Hitler. To her amusement, Amelia (after stuttering for a good fifteen seconds) told Daria that she was so bold for saying so, and that the Nazis weren't all that bad after all. Daria continued to raise the stakes, just to see if Amelia would back down, but within minutes, she had gotten the freckled girl to say that the Jews had had it coming. Daria then admitted that she was, in fact, bullshitting Amelia. Amelia nervously laughed the whole thing off. Still, despite her sycophantic ways, she was at least a respite from the diabolic Skip Stevens. His enthusiasm revolted Daria, almost as much as his efforts to get her to participate in camp life. Even after Mr. Potts (the camp's owner) asked him to cut it out given Daria's circumstances, he didn't relent.

Having tired of him one night, Daria decided to end his miserable existence. At dinner, she slipped him a note inviting him to a tryst out in the middle of the woods. Being a young man in the throes of puberty, he naturally accepted. Upon his arrival at their meeting spot, she put on her best seductive voice and asked him to strip down. He complied, because even though Daria was the camp weirdo, she was also a girl. Once he was down to his underwear, he asked Daria to reciprocate.

Daria walked up and struck him in the groin as hard as possible.

Skip flew backwards as an actual croaking sound came out of his mouth, while blood soaked into his underwear from his ruptured, ruined genitals. She thought about letting him suffer like this for all the small ways he had annoyed her over the summer, but it had been weeks since she had killed, and she wanted to hurry through it. Death came quickly for Skip as Daria opened his skull open much like one would open a jar.

An ear-splitting shriek drew Daria's attention away from Skip. Amelia was there, on the other side of the clearing, having seen it all, having naturally followed Daria after she had gone to meet with Skip. Daria closed the distance between them almost instantaneously, grabbing Amelia by the throat just hard enough to cut off her air. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Daria asked rhetorically. She considered just squeezing until everything between Amelia's jaw and shoulders was pulp, but she had a better idea.

She dragged Amelia effortlessly to Skip's body, where she threw Amelia face-down on top of it. She pointed to the open skull. "Eat," Daria commanded.

Amelia looked from his exposed brains to Daria and back and forth a few more times. "I...why? I don't...please..." Amelia mumbled out.

Daria leaned in close to her friend. "If you don't start eating in the next five seconds, I am going to rip your legs off, do you understand me? I will rip them off and bathe in your fucking blood. And I won't be your friend any more."

Daria didn't know if her last addition had any effect, but Amelia managed to scoop up a small handful of the still-pink meat, open her mouth, and (after one last quick glance at Daria's face), popped it into her mouth and swallowed. "Are...are you going to hurt me now?" she asked in a very small voice.

Daria smiled and put one arm around the scared girl. "Not at all, Amelia. We're just two friends on a picnic, after all." She casually thrust both hands into Skip's abdomen, reached up, and tore his chest open from the inside. She plucked his still-twitching heart from inside, messily tore it in two, and handed one half to Amelia. "Dig in!"

XXXX

The next day, the girls returned to camp together. Daria informed Mr. Potts that Skip had attempted to rape them, when a wild bear stumbled upon the three of them and chased Skip off. Amelia was too shell-shocked to confirm or deny this story. Both girls were sent home early, and forest rangers found Skip's remains several weeks later. The autopsy concluded he had been mauled and partially eaten by a bear.

XXXXXXXXXX

I must apologize, for in the previous chapter I gave the impression that Daria was a 'good' killer, when in fact she is most definitely not, as I set out to explicity demonstrate in this chapter. I wouldn't say she's strictly evil, though...more like she's simply utterly amoral.

I've actually noticed that I've been rather nihilistic in my writings, lately...or, if not properly nihilistic, then at least overly violent and destructive. I think the reason is global warming - some of the worst-case scenarios projected for the next century depress the hell out of me, so I've been venting. Mainly with this and Daria Unscripted, although there are a few other stories I've been working on which are so...out there...well, I don't think those other stories will ever see the light of day. 


End file.
